The king makes a good subject. Over the months of designing and modelling his head in profile for the British coinage, I have had to examine his features with the scrutiny of a cartographer mapping a landscape.
The process of modelling a bas-relief is painstaking. Commissioned by the Royal Mint, I made a model in plasticine about the size of my outstretched hand and no more than a few millimetres deep. This was then digitally scanned and reduced before dies were struck and coins started pouring into crates. When I was told a test run of 50p pieces was to be produced, I asked how many, imagining a dozen or so. “We’ll start with 9.6m,” came the reply.
Normally I make public statues. These have been to great authors, including John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and Charles Dickens, as well as to previously neglected women such as Mary Seacole and Sheffield’s women of steel. They are necessarily one-offs, and I am used to magnification of scale rather than quantity. I’ve never sculpted anything as small as a coin before. The head I modelled will be used on the obverse face of all the denominations, right down to the humble penny.
The responsibility of creating a piece of work that would be reproduced in the hundreds of millions weighed on me. And yet in many ways the job was no different from any other. I pored over the plasticine model, questioning not only whether it looked enough like its subject but also whether it was sufficiently coherent in artistic terms.
I also designed the inscriptions surrounding the head in collaboration with the team at the Royal Mint. So to questions of sculptural soundness were added those of design – how much did its elements visually and conceptually complement each other?
The head on a coin is described at the Royal Mint as an effigy. I found this interesting. What was the difference between a likeness, a portrait and an effigy? I knew that the best way of achieving a likeness was not to pursue one at all, but rather to examine the underlying structure of the head in close detail and set it down methodically. And I knew that a portrait was this structure given life and expression. But an effigy? It took a while to understand.
Looking at past monarchs’ heads on British coins, I was struck by their lack of expressiveness. Or at least that the impassivity in the faces manifested something beyond personality. Something to do with sovereignty itself. The impervious mien says: “I am the monarch, not the individual.” This symbolism can be harder to convey when, as is traditional with male sovereigns, coins carry an uncrowned head. What the effigy already has to say by subtler means, the inclusion of the crown for a special coronation edition of the coin released today emphasises.
I’ve been told I made King Charles look very human. I think this may be a fortuitous byproduct of the rigorous structural examination of the head. Performed diligently, this process should deliver convincing humanity, even when the expression of personality is intentionally reduced. However disciplined the process, though, artists are regularly imagined to have concocted ideas that never crossed their minds. I was suspected of having included the form of a bird whispering into the king’s ear. This was a nice conceit. I’m not crafty enough to have thought it up myself, but I am forced to admit that the tragus I modelled (a prominence at the front of the outer ear) and the folds beneath it do look surprisingly avian.
Current media discourse about portrait sculptures and public statues has focused on the people represented, and only considered them in artistic terms when they laughably fall short, such as with the bust of Cristiano Ronaldo at Madeira airport.
I couldn’t more wholeheartedly support the recent surge in enthusiasm for the installation of statues to neglected figures who changed our world for the better. Sadly, more often than not, according to the objective standards of sculptural tradition, these have been disappointing works of art. Artists have too regularly pursued a kind of literalism which may be at home within the confines of an institution like Madame Tussauds, but generates only kitsch when applied to figurative sculpture.
It is far from being the sole example, but the much celebrated statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square in London is a case in point. An inert and literal reproduction of much of the figure by digital means, its subject deserves so much better. If you are looking for recent representations of heroic women with which it might be compared, seek out Noor Inayat Khan or Violette Szabo by the sculptor Karen Newman. These are tours de force of portraiture in their confidently modelled inventive forms.
Examining a portrait, we may profitably ask: “Is it true?”, not: “Is it accurate?” Figurative art is a metaphorical discourse. A good public figure sculpture, whether it is a few centimetres across like a coin, or metres tall like a statue, needs initially to convince and impress the viewer optically. Before we concentrate solely on who is represented we might first consider it as an object occupying visual and conceptual space, informing what is around it and being informed by its surroundings. As a representation of a person, we may ask, is it inhabited? Does it compellingly represent a unique human form?
These are questions I have to direct at my own work. In 2017, my statue of George Orwell was erected outside BBC Broadcasting House in London. Conceptually, it had to be indissolubly tied to the institution it ornamented, as well as to the author’s quotation that I carved in the wall next to it. I wanted Orwell to speak both for the BBC and to the BBC. Visually, it had to hold its own, not only as a representation of a particular lanky and weather-beaten intellectual, but also as a dark form against a great wall of pale stone, in compositional harmony with its accompanying inscription: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
So much of this art is about careful scrutiny, as though you were drawing up a map. There used to be a story going round the life classes at art school. An exasperated student one day turned to Matisse who was struggling to teach him to draw the model. “Everything you tell me is about measurement!” Matisse laconically replied: “What else is there?”
That is true of drawing and equally of sculpture, but so is its opposite. Matisse also said: “Exactitude is not truth.” Sovereign, poet or factory worker – and whatever they wear on their heads – your subject must come to life.
Martin Jennings makes public sculptures and was commissioned by the Royal Mint to produce the effigy of King Charles III for the new coinage
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
